


This Semblance Of Me

by cuttooth



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Gen, M/M, Pre-Slash, Spoilers MAG 126, wild speculation
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-18
Updated: 2019-02-18
Packaged: 2019-10-31 01:30:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17839832
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/cuttooth/pseuds/cuttooth
Summary: Martin's doing his best. Except now Jon's back, and so are the tape recorders.





	This Semblance Of Me

**Author's Note:**

> I feel like I'm going to be writing a lot of post-episode fix-it fic this season. Based on my wild speculation about what's going on with the Beholding, Web, and Lonely as of MAG 126, which is almost sure to be 100% off base. 
> 
> Title from "Deathwaltz" by Esben and the Witch.

 

Martin’s doing his best, he really is. 

It’s the hardest thing he’s ever had to do, but as his mum used to say, nothing worthwhile is ever easy. And this is probably the most worthwhile thing he could possibly do. He’s trying. 

It would have been a lot easier if Jon didn’t wake up.

*

At the beginning, his flat was full of spiders. Not in a horror film sort of way, there were just...a lot of spiders, in the corners of the ceiling, around the window frame, in the back of the wardrobe. Hovering in their webs, motionless and watchful. Peter had warned him to expect some pushback. _The powers are instinctive,_ he’d said. _They want what they want, and they don’t take well to any perceived loss. They’re not much for planning, themselves. That’s why they have us._

_The human factor_ , he’d called it without a hint of irony.  

His voice had been warm with affection as he said it, at least as far as Peter could be warm with anything. The voice of a patient caretaker who knows what’s best for his beloved charge. Martin wonders what that’s like, adoring one of the powers as Peter does. He is supposed to be a servant of the Beholding, but all he feels about it - or any of the powers - is afraid. 

He never minded the spiders specifically, though. And he could never bring himself to kill them, only shooed them gently outside one at a time. They kept coming back, and after a few weeks Martin had mentioned it to Peter. _Don’t worry about it_ , Peter had told him, and after that there had been fewer and fewer spiders, and eventually none at all. Martin wonders if Peter whooshed them away somewhere, or if they simply lost interest. 

He never felt _observed_ , by anything other than the spiders. _They don’t take well to any perceived loss_ , Peter had said. But there’d been nothing, from his own supposed patron, for six months. An absence as tangible as the loneliness that replaced it. 

Except now Jon’s back, and so are the tape recorders. 

It makes sense, he supposes, and he tries not to find it comforting. They’re not here for him, they’re here for Jon. He’s just a topic to inform the Archivist about, something that may hold a certain modicum of interest. He shouldn’t talk to them, any more than he should have talked to Jon. 

But it’s difficult.

It was...really nice, hearing Jon’s voice. His actual voice, not just the scratchy approximation of a recorded statement. Seeing him, although he looked even thinner than usual, tired and uncertain. It had taken everything he had to walk away, to not engage, to remember that he can’t be attached anymore.

 _Balance requires objectivity_ , Peter reminds him frequently, _And you can’t be objective when you’re attached._

*

There is a tape recorder on his desk (really Peter’s desk, formerly Elias’) when he gets back from lunch. It’s not surprising, it’s happened half a dozen times over the past week. _Don’t worry about it_ , Peter tells him, but the tape recorders seem to be growing more frequent rather than less. More difficult to shoo away than spiders, he supposes, especially in the Institute. 

This one isn’t recording, though. It is just sitting there, gray and expectant. This is new, which makes Martin nervous. He stands there and looks at it for a minute or so, trying to decide what to do. The tape recorder is motionless, yet somehow as threatening as a live snake. Finally Martin reaches a hand towards it, hesitantly. Before he can touch it, it clicks loudly (he jumps) and begins to play.

There is a heavy sigh, and emotion rushes through Martin. It’s probably worrying that he recognizes Jon just from his sigh.

“I wish I could talk it through with Martin,” the tape says, obviously picking up mid-recording. “Or Tim. Or Sasha. But we never really did that, did we?”

Martin thinks his heart might be breaking at the grief in Jon’s voice. He sounds like someone with the weight of the world on his shoulders. Martin understands. He misses them too.

“Everything’s changed,” says Jon on the tape, and Martin wants to cry. 

The tape clicks off, and the tape recorder stubbornly refuses to do anything else however long Martin glares at it. 

“Suit yourself,” he mutters finally, and gets back to filing. 

*

There are social animals, Martin’s heard, that can die of loneliness. Some species have to be kept in pairs or groups, or else they simply...stop. Stop eating, stop grooming, stop caring about anything. He even read an article once about ants that couldn’t digest food when they were kept on their own, walking aimlessly around their enclosure until they died. He doesn’t think that can happen with humans, but sometimes it feels like it. 

He understands why it’s necessary. Peter’s provided him with the evidence, dug out of the Archives over months, that something is coming. _Incubating_ , as Peter had described it, between the Web and the Eye. Something new, something growing, something hungry to carve out a space for itself in the amygdalas of the world. 

_What does that mean for the Institute?_ Martin had asked him, after reading all the proof, his hands shaking slightly. 

_Imagine you have a tumor,_ Peter had said, _That wants to become you._

*

The tape recorders keep turning up, with Jon’s voice on them. Martin knows he shouldn’t listen to them, but they’re hard to avoid. He equally knows that’s only an excuse, that the deepest part of him aches to hear Jon, tired and sad and defeated as he sounds. Some days the recorders play him full statements, other times just snippets of Jon’s follow up notes and musings. Even frustrated and under-resourced, Martin still loves listening to the way Jon’s mind works, the way he puts connections together, sharp and fast. 

He hears Jon and Basira performing impromptu surgery on Melanie, and almost forgets to breathe. It’s the most animated he’s heard Jon since his return, though, and if they’re able to help Melanie that’s - that’s good. He hears his own brief meeting with Jon, and wants to crawl under a rock at the dismissiveness in his voice. _That’s not really me_ , he wants to scream at the Jon on the tape, his little “yeah” of acceptance. It’s for the best, he reminds himself firmly.

He knows he’s just imagining the slight hitch in Jon’s voice whenever he says Martin’s name. Wishful thinking, or at the very most, Jon feeling awkward about Martin’s abandonment. 

He doesn’t know if these tapes are moving about, and Jon isn’t noticing, or if they’re somehow replicating. They’re never around when he looks for them later, though, and he’s never presented with the same one twice. 

Peter doesn’t say anything, although he can’t be unaware. Perhaps he doesn’t want to give them any more attention than he needs to, if he can’t whoosh them away. 

The other tape recorders keep coming too, almost every day now, listening with inscrutable hunger while Martin writes schedules and reviews expense reports and generally makes sure the Institute doesn’t shut down through the mundane means that Peter tends to handwave away. 

He shouldn’t talk to them, he knows. It’s just...he hasn’t had anyone to talk to in a long time. Nobody but Peter, and that’s worse than talking to no one at all. He doesn’t say _anything_ to them, not really, just pleasantries and whatever nonsense goes through his head. It’s the same reason people get cats when they live alone, he supposes. 

“I suppose you are a bit like a cat,” he tells the tape recorder. “You just lie around all day and get fed. And you’re pretty smug. No wonder Jon likes you so much. I always thought he’d be a cat person.”

He pauses, a lump rising in his throat. He really needs to stop talking about Jon, especially to the recorders, because he’s hearing Jon’s tapes. What if - 

Martin stops breathing. Swallows hard, and licks his suddenly dry lips.

“Jon…” he breathes, scarcely a whisper. “If you - you ever hear this, I - I’m - ”

The tape whines with static, and Martin clamps his mouth shut, blinking dampness out of his eyes. Peter’s smile is particularly icy today.

*

He starts to feels _different_ , after the tape recorders come back. Sharper. Clearer headed than he’s been in months. Isolation is a fog, he knows, but he hadn’t realized just how much it had dulled his senses, his thoughts. 

He doesn’t tell Peter about this, because he knows exactly what Peter would say, that this is stalling his progress, that he  _needs_ to detach himself entirely, embrace the Lonely and all it entails. This isn’t making him feel any less lonely, though, it’s just making it easier to think, to research, and with the pile of Dekker statements Peter’s provided him, he needs his wits about him. 

So he lets the tapes run while he reads the statements, and makes follow up notes, trying to draw the lines between all the evidence they’ve gathered. He thinks of Jon, down in the Archives, working in parallel on his own research, talking out loud to his own tapes. It feels like a connection somehow, and even though Martin knows he shouldn’t cling to that, it feels good.

*

He sees Jon one day, sitting outside a café a few streets from the Institute. It’s midday, and Martin is trying to get some lunch, which is often a challenge. He gets bumped into a lot on the street these days, as if people don’t quite notice him. Sitting at a table waiting to be served is an exercise in futility, and even in Marks and Spencer he more often than not gets ignored in the queue until he waves his hand right in the cashier’s face.

He doesn’t see all of Jon, only the back of his head and his shoulders above the café’s wooden barrier, but Martin would recognize him anywhere: the way his hair curls slightly at the base of his skull, the defensive hunch of his shoulders, as if the world might attack him at any moment. Martin’s stomach does a slow flip, and he stands there for a moment, drinking in the sight. 

It takes several seconds for him to realize that Jon is not alone. A woman is sitting opposite him, painfully thin and wearing a jacket with the hood pulled up over her face. Martin feels the same surge of irrational jealousy he does when he sees Jon with, well, _anyone_ he doesn’t know. He squashes it immediately, because even if he had any right to feel that way, it’s not helping. It’s far too much like attachment. He thinks of being alone, of letting that gray, numbing fog roll over his senses, and lets out a long, slow breath as it does. 

The woman’s head snaps suddenly in his direction, and even from a distance and beneath the hood he can see there’s something wrong with her face. Her eyes are glittering and...too many? Martin blinks, and she’s already turned back to Jon, smiling gently at something he’s said.

Martin continues staring, captive and glued to the spot, until someone walks right into him from behind and almost knocks him over. He shakes his head to clear it, and continues reluctantly on his way, leaving a bewildered woman looking around for what she bumped into.  

*

The next morning there is a spider in his (Peter’s) office, and something goes through him that feels akin to relief. He’s not sure why.

The day after, there are three spiders. 

*

With the clarifying presence of the tape recorders, Martin’s research into Dekker’s statements is going well. So well, in fact, that he pulls out all the notes he’s taken since they began this endeavor, all the proof Peter’s provided him, and begins to read it all to the tape recorder. 

It...doesn’t make sense. 

The basics are okay. There is ample evidence that a new power is emerging, and that it is sprouting at the juncture of the Web and Beholding, where their influence overlaps. Adelard Dekker seems convinced that this will disrupt the status quo in some seismic manner, shifting the real estate of fear, the newcomer jostling with its elbows to find a place at the table. But...using the Lonely to prevent its emergence? That’s where the links break down.

Martin turns it over every way he can, combing through the statements, the reference books, the copious notes and files. He _knows_ that it made sense, when Peter had taken him through it. Explained how only he could balance between the Web and the Beholding, could channel the power of Isolation to quarantine the parasitic power growing between them. But now he simply can’t grasp where that came from. He can’t see any way to that conclusion.

It had been three months after the Unknowing that Peter had come to him with his plan. Three months, he said, to gather the evidence Martin would need to believe him.

Three months, with the Lonely taking root in the Institute, its influence spreading through them all. Isolating them, numbing their thoughts, the Eye’s vision dulled with no avatar of its own to stand firm.

Martin’s hands are trembling, his pulse racing. He feels like he might vomit. He’s always known Peter was manipulating him (he’s a monster, it’s what they do) but at least he had known it was all for a good reason. At least he had known he was feeding himself to the Lonely to save - to save everyone. It had been a comfort, of sorts. 

But now - 

God, what is Peter _doing?_ What is he using _Martin_ to do?

He needs to talk to Jon.

The tape whines like a frightened animal, and when Martin turns around Peter looks stern and disappointed.

“Oh, Martin,” he says, “You were doing so well.”

Martin opens his mouth to say something like _fuck you_ , but Peter is gone.

So is everything else.

*

It’s not entirely empty where he is. If Martin concentrates, he can make out the vague shapes of furniture and walls through the fog. Elias’ ridiculously ornate desk, the filing cabinet in the corner, the open door. Can almost feel them under his hands, even, but it’s like the entire world has gone numb, sensation blunted and distant. 

He knows where he is, of course. He knows this feeling, though he has never felt it so purely unfiltered before, absolute, soul-crushing loneliness. It steals the breath from his lungs, sets his heart thudding with fear and his legs wobbling under him. It is everything Peter has ever promised, and threatened, and he thinks he is panicking, in a muted sort of way.

Is this forever? Or is it a lesson - a temporary punishment? Martin thinks of Barnabas Bennett, the sad pile of bones in Elias’ office, and this time he actually does vomit, though he can scarcely taste the sour acid in his throat.

“Peter!” he shouts, and it comes out thin and whiny. “Peter, stop it! Let’s - let’s talk about this, please!”

It’s useless, he knows. The fog stays thick and silent, the dull terror of isolation pressing in on him from all sides. He’s alone. There’s no way out of here. 

He stumbles out of what remains of Elias’ office, clinging to the barely tangible presence of the walls as he heads towards the Archives. It’s where the Beholding is strongest. Maybe he can - can break through somehow. Maybe his patron will finally show him the smallest ounce of consideration. Maybe - maybe Jon will -

 _(Stupid, stupid, you’re all alone and he doesn’t know and he wouldn’t care anyway. You abandoned him first.)_

Despair washes over him, but he stumbles on anyway.

*

When Martin was six years old, he accidentally locked himself in a cupboard playing hide and seek. Nobody had heard him crying for hours, and he had eventually fallen asleep believing that he would be trapped in there forever. He’s always blamed that for his fear of tight spaces. Really, though, what he remembers is being alone, lost for so long that he thought he would never be found, that he would be alone forever, just like he’s alone now, like he’s always going to be alone. 

_(Martin is in the Archives, and everything is gray and lost and deadened. He is under his own desk, he thinks, crawled underneath to set his back against the faint sensation of the wood, seeking some grounding point in the emptiness. The cold and silence press in around him, betraying the uselessness of his tiny refuge, the futility of hope. Nobody would hear him if he cried. Maybe they won’t even find his bones.) _

His mum had been angry at him, when they found him at last, for worrying everyone so much. But his dad had picked him up in his arms, and told him he was okay, and he’d known that he was. It’s been a long time since Martin has known he was okay.

 _(Fear is an anesthetic; it’s getting difficult to think.)_

*

There is a sound, very far away. He ignores it. There’s nothing in here but him, and if there is, it’s something Peter’s sent to finally tear him limb from limb, scatter his pieces across the Archives for, for _someone_ to find. _(Will Jon be angry at him, when they finally find him? Will he be sad?)_ He curls further in on himself, presses his face into his folded arms. He’s so cold.

The sound comes again, louder. It sounds like a voice.

“ - tin,” it says.

He shakes his head. He’s lost, and there’s no point trying to find him, nobody ever will. It’s a waste. The voice does not agree.

“Martin!” it says, sharper now. He knows it, of course he does, his heart aches with the familiarity of it. _Go away_ , he wants to say. _Don’t try to find me, I’m supposed to be lost. This is what I wanted all along._

“Martin, please!” Jon’s voice is tinny, distant, like a tape recording. “If you can hear me, just follow the thread!”

Martin did, he followed all the threads, and they didn’t make any sense. They just led him here. He squeezes his eyes shut and wishes Jon would leave him alone. Leave him lost.

“Look for the thread!” Jon insists, and Martin reluctantly opens his eyes. If he looks, then maybe Jon will stop ordering him around. 

There’s nothing, just dead space and damp fog, gray and gray and gray and -

\- and a glint of something, faint and shining, a thin, silver strand.

It is less than a hair’s breadth, scarcely nothing cutting through the gray, but it is _not_ nothing and Martin’s eyes take it in greedily. He holds his breath, as if it might disappear if he disturbs the air.

“Please, Martin,” Jon’s voice comes again, muted by the fog but so desperately _him_. “Please, I - god, I don’t know if you can even hear me.”

_I can_ , Martin wants to tell him, _I heard you all along, the tape recorders brought you to me, and I’m sorry, I’m sorry I didn’t tell you, I’m sorry I left you alone._

“I - I don’t know where you are, exactly,” Jon tells him, “But you need to find the thread and you need to _follow_ it.”

The thread shimmers in Martin’s vision, as if vibrating to the sound of Jon’s voice. Martin trusts Jon. If Jon wants him to follow the thread, he will. He watches it twist through the gray, into nothingness, and he wills his numb body to unfold, to get up, to _move_. His legs buckle under him like unbaked clay, unwilling to take his weight. His arms are leaden, reaching out ponderously towards that shining, fragile strand. 

“Please, Martin, we need you to come back.” Jon’s voice is rough with grief, and Martin’s heart stutters in his chest. 

“ _I_ need you,” says Jon. 

Martin’s fingers close around the thread. He feels it clinging to his skin, sensation clean and bright as a knife. He feels it tugging him forward, gentle and insistent, and he lets it. 

The fog washes over his skin, wet and chilling, trying to tow him back and down and under, but the thread keeps pulling him forward. There is a heavy rush of sound and pressure in his ears, like being on a flight at take off but far worse, blunt pain throbbing through his skull. He screws his eyes shut, grits his teeth. 

His ears pop, sharp and painful, and -  

*

“Martin!”

He opens his eyes and Jon is there, and he’s in the Archives. Relief pours through him in an overwhelming wave, and his legs give out, folding under him until he’s sitting huddled on the musty carpet. 

“Martin - ” Jon’s voice is very close, and then Jon’s hand is on his shoulder, the other on his jaw, tipping his face up, Jon’s worried eyes intent on him.

“Are you all right?” Jon asks, anxious. “It's been _days_ \- god, I thought we’d lost you.”

“Sorry,” Martin says, and Jon gives a breathless laugh. Unbelievably, pulls Martin close against him, arms going around him tight. Martin dares to mirror the gesture, lets his hands slide around Jon’s waist and across his back until he can feel Jon’s rapid heartbeat against his own. 

“You found me,” he mumbles against Jon’s neck, dazed and astounded. Jon nods. 

“The tapes told me what happened,” he says. “Let me _see_ you, even when you were lost. Annabelle did the rest.”

Martin looks up over Jon’s shoulder, and recognizes the woman standing across the room, her face shadowed and her hands twisting slowly together, thin strands of silver winding between her fingers. 

“Umm, thanks,” he says. She nods carefully, eyes shining under her hood. 

“The Web and the Eye can do much more, together,” she says.

Sudden alarm jolts through Martin, and he pulls away to look Jon in the face. One of Jon’s hands stays on his shoulder, though, right at the base of his neck, firm and tangible.

“Peter - ” he says, almost choking on the memory of the cold. Jon frowns.

“Gone,” he says, his voice firm and authoritative. “The Lonely has no place at the Institute.”

“What he told me wasn’t all lies. There's something - ”

“There is,” Jon agrees, “And we’ll have to deal with it. But we’ll do it together.”

His hand clasps the back of Martin’s neck, warm and solid, and for the first time in a long time, Martin feels like maybe he might be okay.

Somewhere, a tape recorder clicks off. 


End file.
